Last updated: November 14th, 2024
Discover how to add analytical skills to your resume in a way that persuasively sells your ability to insightfully solve problems and make decisions.
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When To Emphasise Critical Thinking On Your Resume.
Job ads for roles across diverse business functions, industries and seniority levels may mention analytical or critical thinking skills.
Recruiters and hiring managers are interested in how well you evaluate, diagnose and determine the best way forward.
Important!
This correlates to your ability to overcome problems, develop novel and effective solutions, and set coherent business strategies.
Employers hiring for specific business, IT and finance analyst, research and data scientist positions will want concrete evidence that you can systematically follow processes or use specific software/techniques to analyse, forecast, report and present insights.
What Kinds Of Analytical Thinking Can You Highlight?
Analytical and critical thinking skills can be hard to pinpoint. Everyone who works uses their cognitive skills to process information and solve problems, to some extent.
How can you demonstrate a superior level of perception, reasoning and good judgement? It helps to break down what analytical thinking entails.
Analytical thinkers are good at:
- Identifying that a problem exists, how to attack a complex issue in a logical sequence, and determining the cause of problems that arise.
- Gathering the right information, feedback and evidence for review, ensuring it’s actually relevant, of high quality and logically consistent.
- Interpreting data and information to find patterns, spot trends, and understand relationships/intent, as well as identify knowledge gaps.
- Forecasting future needs, opportunities, and costs and predicting how events will unfold based on past patterns or seasonal trends.
- Drawing clear conclusions, making confident decisions/recommendations, clarifying the steps to solve challenges, and presenting information and insights effectively.
(Related: How To Showcase Management Skills On Your Resume).
So you can see that analytical and critical thinking dovetails with a number of other hard and soft skills you may want to highlight on your resume, such as:
- Research skills.
- Data analytics.
- Creativity.
- Strategy/leadership.
- Financial management/budgeting.
- Problem-solving.
- Project management.
- Working well under pressure.
- Attention to detail.
- Communication and presentation skills.
(Related: How To List Budgeting Skills On Your Resume.)
As you brainstorm the analytical thinking competencies and achievements to include on your resume, pay attention to the following:
Measurement and research techniques you’ve applied such as:
- Data modelling, P&L/profitability/cashflow analysis, forecasting.
- Business/performance reviews, audits, and ROI evaluations.
- SWOT analysis, competitor, market, policy and regulation analysis.
- Experiments, trials, testing and proof of concept projects.
- Consumer, industry or employee research/surveys or benchmarking.
- Roundtables, workshops and stakeholder interviews/events.
Software and tools you’ve used in analysis or solution development such as:
- Coding/programming languages like Python, R and SQL.
- Data warehousing and processing stacks like Snowflake, Azure or Oracle.
- Excel, Tableau, PowerBI and other data analytics and visualisation platforms.
- Accounting software, ERPs, HRISs, and other enterprise systems.
- Google Analytics, SEO tools, and social media monitoring tools.
Activities that required you to present or act on insights such as:
- Leading annual planning and strategy development.
- Managing major transformations or client projects.
- Creating insightful reports, dashboards, presentations.
- Planning sales, marketing and client engagement tactics.
- Implementing new systems, processes or business model.
- Organising team or stakeholder events to share decisions.
- Developing successful business cases or client proposals.
- Introducing a new policy, guideline or methodology.
- Developing white papers, infographics and other content.
How To Make Analytical Skills Shine On Your Resume?
Every skill included on your resume should be relevant to the role you’re applying to, and proven through examples.
Great resumes that land on the top of the callback pile do not simply include a dot point that says ‘Strong analytical skills’.
But as you craft examples that demonstrate your impact — the numbers and outcomes that illustrate your successes — make an effort to weave in language that also explains your analytical or problem-solving approach.
- How did you identify this was a problem worth prioritising?
- How did you get a clearer and complete picture of an issue?
- Which tools, analysis, consultation and comparison methods did you use?
- How did you overcome knowledge gaps, biases, and assumptions?
- How did you reach a final decision or develop the best-fit solution?
- How did you validate, test, enhance and enact your ideas?
Here are some examples of how different types of professionals can showcase analytical thinking skills within accomplishments:
| Marketer | Designed and led UX testing with target audiences to uncover product and application optimisations that contributed to a lift in NPS score above 50. |
| Software Engineer | Deployed an automated data cleansing solution using SQL that eliminated 90% of duplicates and improved the accuracy of insights produced. |
| Manager | Enhanced shift schedules based on employee feedback and an analysis of time tracking data, which reduced absenteeism by 20%. |
| Analyst | Developed financial models using Excel and PowerBI for vendor cost analysis that informed procurement negotiations resulting in $100,000 in cost savings. |
| Senior Executive | Oversaw a cross-functional, data-driven review of churn across the customer journey to deliver improvements that boosted year-over-year revenue by over 25%. |
(Related: How To Radically Improve Achievements In Your Resume).
Depending on the role, it may be valuable to showcase a mix of qualitative and quantitative analytical skills. For example, if you’re vying for an Operations Manager position, you might have:
- Used statistical methods to understand the relationship between average office overheads compared to regional pricing variations, based on sample data from each geography.
- Used your judgement to develop a well-received return-to-work policy based on written responses to employee surveys and one-on-one conversations with colleagues.
The breadth of your analytical skills helps position you as a more flexible and creative leader, who can use the right approach depending on the situation and the information available.
After all, leaders are often tasked with making decisions quickly.
You can often tweak your existing examples by calling out critical thinking steps. Here’s an example:
Initiated monthly stakeholder forums that helped increase peak body membership by 30% within 12-months.
Initiated monthly stakeholder forums to understand our audience’s development needs and refine engagement strategies, leading to a 30% increase in memberships.
You see how the second example helps the hiring manager understand your capacity to collect and assess information to make effective decisions?
Where To List Analytical Skills On Your Resume.
To give hiring managers the impression that your analytical skills are robust, be sure to allude to your analytical approach and achievements throughout your resume:
- Your ‘Profile’ or summary section should mention your strongest capabilities related to analysis, problem-solving or data modelling.
- Your ‘Skills’ or ‘Key Assets’ section should list specific data analytics tools and techniques you’re proficient in and how you’ve used them for critical thinking tasks.
- Your ‘Work Experience’ section should showcase specific examples of how you made an impact in past roles by applying your analytical approach — focus on tangible results.
- Your ‘Professional Development’ section should include specific qualifications, courses, memberships, mentoring, or presentations that reinforce your analytical skills.
Employers Are Prioritising Analytical Thinking, So Should You.
A 2023 World Economic Forum report on the future of jobs found analytical thinking was considered a core skill by more companies than any other skill.
It’s also employers’ highest priority for skills training out to 2027.
If you can show that you already have analytical skills, or a strong foundation to build on, you’ll be a more attractive hire in almost every organisation.
Need help to capture and communicate your unique analytical thinking skills to position yourself as the ideal candidate? Arielle Executive are experts in personal branding, resume and cover letter creation, and interview preparation.
Jody
